Andrew Lytle, in his family memoir A Wake for the Living, compares the past to a foreign country. “If we dismiss the past as dead,” he writes, “and not as a country of the living which our eyes are unable to see, as we cannot see a foreign country but know it is there, then we are likely to become servile.” The value of Destinations Past lies in its author’s ability to make both the past and the foreign come alive. The historian in John Lukacs leads him to recognize that “we travel in time as well as in space.” His voyages—whether to England in 1965 for Winston Churchill’s funeral, to Austria in 1989 for Adolf Hitler’s 100th birthday, or to Hungary in 1990 for the first meeting of a new, freely elected parliament —are more than adventures; they are “contacts with history.”

A collection of 21 essays published in various places (including Chronicles) over the last 40 years. Destinations Past follows Lukacs’s train of thought as he journeys—literally or, as in the essay “Cook’s Continental Timetable,” only figuratively—from his home in eastern Pennsylvania to various spots in Europe: Venice, Austria, Switzerland, Andorra, London, Greece, Warsaw, Transylvania, Dresden, Budapest, and Scandinavia. It is a memoir not only of the places Lukacs has seen and the moments he has witnessed but of the feelings he has experienced as a Hungarian-born American revisiting the Old World. Lukacs was a young adult when he left Hungary to come to the United States in 1946, and his character had already been formed by the social and cultural structures of interbellum bourgeois Europe. But it was not until he had lived in the United States that he discovered his European identity. Reflecting on his exile status in the preface to this volume, Lukacs writes: “[I]t was in America that I learned much about Europe, and it was not until I had lived for some time in America that I found myself to be a European.” Exiles (as Lloyd Kramer demonstrates in Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830-1848) gain a unique perspective on both their home country and their adopted one by uprooting themselves from familiar surroundings. Lukacs’s dual identity has certainly heightened his sensitivity to cultural differences and positioned him to elucidate historical trends on both sides of the Atlantic.

His evocative language and astute observations recall great travel writers like Henry James, M.F.K. Fisher, Ford Madox Ford, and W. Somerset Maugham—all expatriates themselves at one time or another. His descriptive passages equal those of our best novelists. As example, the first essay in this collection, “Entering Venice” (1954), is reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees in its depiction of the marshy city. And his analysis of Churchill’s name in “Three Days in London” (1965) is as perceptive as it is delightful:

Churchill. How the very sound and shape of his name fitted him. Pouting, aristocratic, flecked by sunlight. The round and juicy sound of the first syllable, formed by lips curling to speak just as his, the air filling up the cheeks of a seventeenth-century boy with a young and churchy sound. . . . The pout merges, in a genial way, into the second syllable. There is nothing chilly about that final syllable, it is short, shiny, even brilliant, that springy sound of a rill. The sound of the full name is serious and humorous: it has a male charm about it: it is like the baroque fountains of Blenheim.

Lukacs’s observations on other cultures also deserve praise—and quotation. Asides like “it is a good queue because it is an English queue, disciplined and good-natured, without jostling”; Warsaw’s “poverty has a smell that is acrid, not sour, like the proud poverty of a woman erect in her old fur coat”; and “in the New World we are avaricious of time but spendthrifts of space” divulge much about the character of various peoples. His most profound insights, however, have to do with historical and political processes. He insists, for instance, on the difference between nationalism and patriotism, which “has marked some of the deepest rifts in the history of the twentieth century”: nationalism, as exemplified by Hitler, is populist, extroverted, aggressive, and ideological; while patriotism is traditionalist, deeply rooted, introverted, and defensive. Lukacs also emphasizes that the age of bureaucracy, and not the age of democracy, has followed the age of aristocracy; even in Russia, he finds in 1976, bureaucracy and international Americanism have triumphed: rather than a corps of elite Ministers, “there are only Very Important Persons, Important Persons, Persons, and, somewhere in the Soviet lists perhaps, unpersons.” Parallel (or is it perpendicular?) to this development, Lukacs sees a reassertion of deep national differences, which (as in Transylvania) have replaced communism and anticommunism as the driving force in world politics. As a result of these two trends, Lukacs concludes, “There are two cultures in the life of the world now. . . . One is international; the other is national. One is represented by the international language of the network of business, of technology, of conference centers, of sociological jargon, of computers, of telex, of airline and airport lingo; the other by the language of domestic life.”

While none of Lukacs’s comments about the modern world is invalid, some are more comical than others. Lukacs often uses humor to make a serious point. Germans seem to be a particular butt of his jokes, as when he writes, “All over Venice pigeons rose with the sun, and 30,000 German cameras in German hands began to click.” Similarly, because of the crowd of (predominantly German) tourists at its mountain spas, Switzerland is no longer the “Balcony of Europe” but rather the “I lot-Water Bottle of the World.” Lukacs’s wit is at its best, however, when directed at the tragic consequences of the Americanization of European cultures. In the Gastein valley of Austria, for instance, Americanization has resulted in a convention center “as ugly as anything conceived by a graduate of the Yale School of Architecture”; in German editions of Playboy and Penthouse; and in Thousand Island Dressing at the Grand Hotel of Hofgastein’s salad bar. Even on a ship in the Baltic Sea, Lukacs cannot escape CNN, “the global equivalent of USA Today, the ceaseless pictorial bilge paraded as information for semiliterate people.”

One of the most amusing (and telling) anecdotes in Destinations Past illustrates how Americanization can soften a once-hardy people. While in England for Churchill’s funeral, Lukacs happens into a fast-food restaurant called Wimpy. He recounts how a middle-aged man enters the restaurant and orders a Wimpy burger:

[H]e said to the waitress: “A Wimpy, please.” As he said that there passed a shadow of embarrassment, a flicker of resigned disturbance across his face. I thought that I could detect something of the same on the otherwise nearly vacuous, pale face of the little waitress too. . . . Surrounded by Wimpies and the cheap metallic filth of plastic dishes and the sex magazines, in the midst of this vast process of thin liquefaction that flicker of embarrassment was a faint sign of the atavistic resistance of the race.

Lukacs uses such anecdotes to contrast the vacuousness and malleability of modern life with an “older kind of humaneness.” A running theme throughout these essays, in fact, is the worthiness of the bourgeois values of the past. While avoiding sentimentality, he exhibits nostalgia for the old-fashioned comforts of the Europe of his youth: turn-of-the-century apartment houses, cozy interiors, good service in restaurants, the Grand Mountain Hotels of Locarno and Lugano, evenings at the opera, family rituals, and holiday feasts. As Lukacs wrote in an essay that first appeared in these pages (“Cold Comfort,” February 1995), the high-bourgeois 19th-century virtues are “a more and more precious heritage as we are carried farther and farther away from [their] time.”

Such reflections are the product of a life that has spanned two continents and two eras. Looking back in a 1989 essay for American Heritage on the monumental changes he has witnessed, Lukacs claimed that he had had “enough brushes with history” and that he did not wish for more. In the preface to this volume, however, he writes: “‘Enough for One Life?’ I am seventy now, but I hope that God may still allow me a little more traveling, and perhaps even a brush with history now and then . . . and a little more writing—because I can’t help it.” The reader of Destinations Past can only share his hope.

 

[Destinations Past: Traveling through History with John Lukacs, by John Lukacs (Columbia: University of Missouri Press) 248 pp., $26.95]